How can I save the edit box data in the GUI Guide?

Question

I am making a GUI in which there is a multi-line edit box.

the user will have to input the 3 x-y coordinates in this edit box at a time:

[345.567 123.123] 
[390.567 178.098]
[378.000 125.987]

by clicking the push button I want these coordinates to be "saved" in the Matlab GUI workspace in the form of a matrix and by clicking another push button "reloaded" from the workspace so that they can be available for future use.

How can I do that?

Can anyone guide me with this? Help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

There are a number of ways to manage data in GUIDE-generated GUIs. The easiest IMO is to use guidata.

For example inside the "Save" push button callback, you would access the edit box string contents, parse as matrix of numbers as save it inside the handles structure.

function pushbuttonSave_Callback(hObject, eventdata, handles)
    handles.M = str2num(get(handles.edit1, 'String'));
    guidata(hObject, handles);
end

Next in the "load" button, we do the opposite, by loading the matrix from the handles structure, converting it to string, and set the edit box content:

function pushbuttonLoad_Callback(hObject, eventdata, handles)
    s = num2str(handles.M, '%.3f %.3f\n');
    set(handles.edit1, 'String',s)
end

If you want to export/import the data to/from the "workspace", you can use the ASSIGNIN/EVALIN function:

assignin('base','M',handles.M);

and

handles.M = evalin('base','M');

Answer 2

to save data:

setappdata(h,'name',value) 

to load data:

value = getappdata(h,'name')
values = getappdata(h)

where h is the handle you store the data in, name is the variable of the data, value is the actual data.